Maybe it’s just as well the Yankees are heading out on a long road trip, because they have become a mess in The Bronx.

The Yankees answered the most important part of their schedule with their worst stretch of the season and they left with a losing record.

With Wednesday’s 6-3 loss to the Rays, the Yankees’ season-high fifth in a row, they finished a 15-game span of games within the AL East with a 6-9 record. And that’s after they started it by winning four straight.

“You can’t change it,” Derek Jeter said. “It’s over with now, it’s done with. We have a lot of games left. So anything that’s happened up until this point, you can forget about it.”

You can’t blame Jeter for wanting to wipe his memory of the season’s first 83 games, which dropped the Yankees to 41-42 and under .500 for the first time since April 11 (5-6).

As the offense continues to struggle and the team can’t find a way to win close games, Jeter said there was only one way to get themselves going.

“We have to play better,” said Jeter, uninterested in discussing the amount of talent the Yankees seemed to have collected last offseason.

“Talent doesn’t win games,” the shortstop said. “You have to perform on the field.”

That didn’t happen again on Wednesday in a game that saw Jeter bunt a ball into the stands and Carlos Beltran lose his grip on his bat in the seventh, with the bat striking a fan — and Beltran striking out.

Though the Yankees got homers from Brett Gardner and Brian McCann, they failed to hit in the clutch. Just like in Tuesday’s loss, the Yankees went 1-for-9 with runners in scoring position (5-for-37 in the five-game losing streak).

On a steamy afternoon at the Stadium, the Yankees played with a depleted lineup that had no Mark Teixeira (sore left knee) and Jacoby Ellsbury, who “needed a day off” according to manager Joe Girardi. Vidal Nuno (2-5) couldn’t repeat the success of his previous start, when he tossed 5 ²/₃ shutout innings against the Red Sox. Nuno allowed four runs (three earned) and eight hits in five innings.

Shawn Kelley gave up the biggest home run of the day, a long two-run shot in the sixth to the first batter he faced, Sean Rodriguez. It gave Tampa Bay the lead and the last-place Rays finished the sweep.

But this was far from a one-day problem, with Yankees hitting coach Kevin Long admitting “offense has been an issue all year” and that he had higher hopes for the bats coming into the season.

When asked what he expected, Long said: “Obviously more than what we’ve done.”

But with more than half the season gone, it’s fair to wonder when (or if) the offense will ever produce.

“We’ve got to turn it around somehow,” Long said. “We’ve got to believe in the guys in this room … these are the only guys that can turn it around. We need these 80 games for these guys to prove themselves.”

The Yankees, who trail the first-place Blue Jays by 4½ games, face an 11-game road trip that will take them into the All-Star break.

Jeter admitted this season, in which the Yankees are trying to avoid missing the postseason for a second straight season, has had more “downs than ups.”

“It seems that way,” he said. “Maybe we’ve got more ups coming in the second half. You have to be optimistic. You can’t sit around and dwell on what’s happened up to this point. You can’t change it.”

No doubt the Yankees would like to.

“We started good and ended bad,” Girardi said of the homestand. “That’s probably the best way to put it.”